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Videos: Iranian filmmaker prank calls NSA over 'lost' email

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Bahram Sadeghi’s series of prank-call videos have deservedly received a lot of attention online. The Iranian filmmaker, who lives in the Netherlands, called the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) pretending to seek help retrieving an email he said he had accidentally deleted.

During the first call, recorded two weeks ago, Sadeghi pretends to be confused and repeatedly asks the NSA representative whether they store people’s emails, which he says is what an employee at his computer store told him. (Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks revealed that the agency collected thousands of Americans’ emails.) Sadhegi helpfully points out that he is Iranian and has lots of friends in the media, information he says the employee at the computer store believed would improve the odds that the NSA stored his emails. The NSA representative, of course, politely says she can’t help him, but is quite eager to take down his contact information.

A week later, Sadeghi called the NSA back to ask if his last phone call might make him the subject of surveillance:

The NSA representatives, this time exasperated, nevertheless tried to reassure him that he had nothing to worry about…

Of course, I didn’t actually lose any emails. I was playing dumb, but I didn’t set out to try to be really funny – I wanted to educate the public about this issue. I was curious to see how the NSA would respond. My first call started out positively enough, but in the end it failed, as I did not manage to get any real answers out of them – and was even hung up on repeatedly!